I love a good corporate tag line. You know, the little phrase following a company’s brand name, like Panasonic’s Just Slightly Ahead of Our Time.

The tag line is supposed to be the embodiment of a company’s corporate vision. It should reflect the company’s brand positioning and, if possible, capture the company’s unique selling proposition (assuming it has one). It should drive the marketing spend, look and content.

The best tag line my former company ever used was during the period when it was part of the Masco group, a collection of upscale home renovation and home furnishing companies that over time have included the likes of Merillat kitchen cabinets, Delta faucets, Weiser locks, Behr paints, as well as Thermador appliances and Hendredon and Drexel Heritage furniture. The tag, encapsulating the premium nature of the group’s various businesses: Where quality finds a home. The play on home worked in principle and in fact.

Tagging in Tough Times

It is interesting to see how companies shift their focus as the winds blow hot and cold. Keeping to the home sector, one of the engines that drive the economic well-being of the nation, The Home Depot strived to be your go-to partner in renovation with their tag: You can do it. We can help. Their commercials appealed to cocooners everywhere and tugged mightily at the heartstrings. But budgets are tighter now and the Big Orange has shifted to More saving. More Doing. This matches up neatly with Walmart’s Save Money. Live Better, a tactical shift that aims at crossing demographic boundaries. Ironically, Lowes Home Improvement Warehouse, Home Depot’s natural born enemy, has gone the old Depot way with its tag: Let’s Build Something Together. Most interesting.

Another company that shifted its emphasis, trying to deke out the recession was Scotiabank, one of Canada’s big five chartered banks. For a number of years, its tag was You’re Richer Than You Think. Scotiabank wanted you to know that it was the one to handle all your ill-gotten gains. But times got tougher in the millennium’s first decade and people just didn’t feel all that rich. So Scotiabank switched on a dime (9.5 cents for American readers) and came up with a new message to potential customers: Get a second opinion. Scotiabank invited Canadians to take advantage of a no-obligation second opinion on their portfolios. The focus was on service and solutions, things it assumed consumers were looking to bank on in tough times. But things are getting better north of the 49th parallel and so Scotiabank has happily brought back the Richer than You Think tag.

Scotiabank hasn’t cornered the market on service, however. Another Canadian chartered banker, TD Bank, stays open from “8 till late”, 50% longer than the competition. TD’s tag is Banking can be this comfortable and the primary visual is an iconic, massive (and, in my wife’s opinion, perfectly ugly) green leather chair.

Zoom Zoom

Ever since the birth of segmentation by GM’s legendary Alfred P. Sloan, car companies have tried hard to match tagline to brand aspiration. Some of these tags have become almost iconic; others, however, are as forgettable as the cars themselves. Following are our best and worst automotive taglines.

Starting with The 5 Best:

#5. Volvo. For Life. This one, though relatively innocuous, resonates because it plays off Volvo’s well-known and well-deserved reputation for safety.

#4. BMW’s The Ultimate Driving Machine may be a bit pretentious but it certainly captures the company’s image of and aspiration for itself. The good news for BMW is that both are shared by its target audience.

#3. Lexus: The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. Lexus has clung to its M.O. and its tag since day one. Perfect. (Side note: I had a terrific assistant who was a bulldog when she had to follow up on something. I told her to add a tagline after she signed one of her menacing memos: The Perfection of Relentless Pursuit.)

#2. Chevy Trucks: Like a Rock. What can I say? I love the song. And it’s certainly better than Ford Tough and Dodge’s Grabbing Life by the (Ram’s) Horns.

#1. Okay, so the header gave it away. Number one is Mazda’s Zoom Zoom. Fun. Fast. Forever young.

And now for The 5 Worst:

#5. If Volvo is fifth best, its Swedish compatriot, Saab, is fifth worst.  Saab never could get it right, however. Born from Jets was bad. Its new Move your mind is truly, mind-bendingly, bad. It would rank higher on the hate scale if anybody actually cared.

#4. On the other hand, there is the curious case of Mercedes Benz. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Mercedes recently dropped its Unlike Any Other for The best or nothing. It’s part of Mercedes’ new strategy to highlight the fact that the company is introducing 16 new models by 2011. Really? I mean, do you get that? Considering the heritage of Engineered Like No Other Car in the World, how did Mercedes Benz come up such a cropper?

#3. Late and unlamented. In another case of what were they thinking? how about Pontiac’s fighting it out with Ford over the rights to Car. Ford’s recent ads let you know that the company “speaks car”. But Pontiac is Car. Don’t get it? Here’s the company’s own explanation: “Car. One simple word. Packed with so much meaning. To some, it stands for freedom. To others it’s hood scoops and horsepower. For others still, it means fun and escape. We all have our own personal definitions. They all mean something special. So let’s bring car back. And all the good it stands for. From the company that always was, and will be, Car.” There you go. From the company that always was, but no longer will be. Car.

#2. Mercury: New doors opened. Case closed.

#1. Toyota tops (bottoms?) the list. You have to question the thinking behind Toyota’s Make Things Better. Seriously, is that a call to action for their own organization or their potential customers? It gets really weird when you remember Toyota’s previous tagline: Moving forward. Considering the sticking accelerator pedal recall crisis to follow, the marketing folks were clearly prescient. All around, this has not been a good year.

Haunted

Of course, when the tagline follows the name but not the thinking way up in the corner office, the words ring more than just hollow. They come back to haunt you.

Consider BP Global’s Beyond Petroleum.  That BP pays lip service to alternate technologies has been well documented. So for anyone paying the slightest attention, Beyond Petroleum is, like everything else BP says, beyond belief.

Enron’s slogan was Ask Why? The “thinking” behind the tag was that Enron was an innovative company because it questioned conventional wisdom. Now, when we look back and consider the actions of “the smartest men in the room”, you know the answer.

Microsoft abandoned its Life Without Walls, which may or may not have been its way of asking the Antitrust folks to leave them alone. Of course, the irony of Life Without Walls is not lost on Windows users who depend on firewalls to protect them against unwanted viruses. Well, at least its new Be What’s Next tag can’t get them into trouble.

Then again, with taglines you never know.

In my last post (see Bad Ad-Itude), I excoriated Whiskas for its inane advertising. Even if the thinking behind the ads was good, the execution was not. Some felt I was overly harsh and so I offer up an ad for the purposes of comparison.

The MO was the same, with a twist. Whiskas’ Hubert et al pretend they are cats. The Cadbury gorilla pretends he is human. The latter (submitted by Fallon, London) was the 2008 Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival so, admittedly, I’m stacking the deck. But the choice of Gorilla at Cannes was not unanimous. You may, indeed, love or hate the ad. But you will, I bet, love the gorilla for his cool and for the expressiveness of his eyes. Just as you, almost as assuredly, hate Hubert for his inane and insufferable manner. Remember, both ads are selling food and both are designed to generate word-of-mouth publicity, so the comparisons are not as specious as they might first appear. The Whiskas ads generated spoofs as silly as the original. The Cadbury ad generated remixes almost as clever as the original. YouTube, as always, is the unofficial arbiter.

By the way, I assume all you ad execs are getting ready for the Cannes festival. With some 25,000 ads from 80 countries submitted each year, the Lions awards are surely the most prestigious, most sought after recognition in the industry. (Results are more important, but they don’t generally get you to the French Riviera.) Online entries open January 29, 2009 with deadlines, depending on the category, March 6, 13 or 20. The work that you enter into Cannes Lions 2009 needs to have aired or been published between March 1, 2008, and April 30, 2009. Entry is getting a bit more complicated; categories seem to be multiplying with the additions of Titanium and Integrated Lions, but that is another story. Good luck all.

To quote Dennis Miller, “Now, I don’t want to rant, but…”

In my former company, I was part of an executive committee set up to oversee all the commercial aspects of the enterprise. It was my practice to show the group our various marketing campaigns while they were still in the design phase. I also showed how our corporate strategic intent and marketing program specifics were perfectly aligned and how all aspects of the various campaigns were fully integrated.

And that was the last time they would see or hear anything until I was good and ready to show it. Good and ready meant that the ad or the brochure was produced and looked fantastic and there was a competitive equivalent that did not. It meant that we had evidence customers were happily cabbaging onto our material with documented results. It meant we had won an award or, better still, two. My colleagues were apparently happy with this approach, partially because they trusted me and mostly because they felt it was more important for them to focus on customer issues, like impending threats and looming opportunities.

This made it easy to be late and safe to produce the odd stinker. Which we, respectively, occasionally were and sometimes did. It helped a great deal that our marketing was at least reputed to be among the industry’s best (not difficult) and that, at the end of the day, we were never over budget (difficult indeed). My withholding strategy was, thus, not a tactic to get away with something, but one merely to keep a reasonable distance between us and the abacus crew (i.e., accounting) until we could put our programs in place.

In the hurly burly of everyday, it is possible for oversight to be manipulated rather than managed. Without proper structures and processes in place, campaigns can become inconsistent or run off on some tangent that has nothing to do with the long-term well-being of the enterprise. Happy numbers get presented that mask return on investment.

What we sometimes see is a gap between concept and execution. That gap may be caused by poor guidance or simply poor taste. As a result, some adverts smell like a prickly durian melon. (Never tried one? You can’t begin to imagine what you’re not missing.)

If you need an example or two, check out the continuous outpouring of putrid creative being produced for Pedigree’s Whiskas cat food line. The silly putty or, worse, silly potty humor of the ‘only cats can be cats’ ads are tasteless to the extreme and can’t possibly be enticing for anyone…least of all cat lovers. You want to strangle the loathsome Hubert and bury the lazy and listless Boris alive. The Temptations ads, with cats repeatedly crashing through walls ostensibly because they would hear someone shaking a bag of treats, are simply stupid. Which is clearly how Whiskas sees its customer base. That said, I suppose some will be drawn to the Whiskas Wet Food Challenge. Who dreams this stuff up? Who, on the client side approves? Is this an agency problem or a management one? There are those that will argue that several of the Whiskas ads have gone viral. Certainly the parody ads have. Is this a plus?

The test of pleasure is the memory it leaves behind. Are the whiskas ads ones you will remember or ones which you will do your best to forget. Do these ads ‘stick’ or are they just…well… just sticky?